Hello and welcome back to our ongoing sexification of Staff past and present and hopefully present-and-future by way of deep-diving casual-reading power-lifting interview posi-sharking antics: Sputnik’s very own Meet the Spartans. Steel yourself as impossible questions are posed and the Staffers you wish you’d had the courage or attention span to acknowledge surpass your wildest expectations.

Today we welcome the most expensive cocoa in the Staff chocolate cupboard. He is a gentlemen among warthogs. He prances heavenwards while the rest of us wipe our noses with our unpaid utility bills. He knows how to write, he’s the essence of charm and dignity when on duty, and he’s too nice to do much more than ignore the hell out of your sorry arse if you’re not up to standard. Believe you me, that’s the treatment most of us deserve and (oh fuckin’ yes) receive. Give it up for the one, the only… Pon! 

Pon. Hi.

Henlo!

What is your alignment?

Based on others’ assessments of me I’m either lawful or chaotic neutral. So I guess I’m completely self-serving and my methods depend on the situation.

Why are you named after a Kyary Pamyu Pamyu song?

“Pone” gave way to “Pön”, which resulted in an attempt to have my Sput name changed to the latter. Regrettably, because Sput’s code is as old as the internet itself, the accented character broke the site and resulted in me being locked out of my own account. Any links to my profile redirected people to a completely different profile that clearly belonged to somebody at some point, but definitely not me. After exhausting any and all solutions, I cut my losses and asked the almighty Jom to change it to something Sput could handle: 3 standard characters.

You have a reputation as a serial thesaurus-user. What makes a word the right word?

As long as a word’s usage works semantically and syntactically, I suppose? Using a bigger word to produce a smaller sentence, or reduce 5 words to 3 is always a good rule of thumb, too. Don’t think that I’m suggesting I’ve always followed my own advice either.

What are your favourite and least favourite cliched descriptors in metal reviews?

Given my affinity for tech-death, “wank”, “generic” and “directionless”, etc. tend to induce a roll of the eyes. There are definitely times when they’re apt, but when they’re also used to describe everything from Brain Drill to Zealotry it’s hard to put much stock in them, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the author’s taste. Regardless of descriptors, I’ve always enjoyed writers who balance technical analysis with their own impressions of mood and theme, etc. Peeps like Rasputin, Crysis, Jots and Clavier were always very good at this.

Word on the street is that you exclusively listen to ear-shredding dissonant jank mayhem, but I know for a fact that you enjoy such sappy hearth-warmers as Carly Rae Jepsen, Tinashe and In Flames. Under what circumstances are consonant melodies permissible, and when are they to be shunned?

Contrary to what user ResidentNihilist will tell you, I don’t actually hate melody. I’m also sure he won’t read this so I’m committing to the bit just to piss him off.

To what extent would you agree that your Emotion review was (and is still) the founding text of Sput poptimism? 

I really don’t think it is. The album had been out in Japan for about a month, and other, bigger tastemaker publications were already singing its praises. Even on Sput itself, Chan was venerating pop and R&B artists well before then. Maybe my Emotion review helped legitimise pop music to a handful of people that would otherwise scoff at it, because of the audience I generally wrote for. Overall, I think its influence was pretty minimal.

Let’s talk about dissodeath before I start to feel I’ve done wrong by you. Has it peaked, and why not? What is its future? How far can the ante be upped, and why do you personally think such a steep proportion of this site feels so strongly about it? Why should anyone listen to dissodeath when Teenage Jesus And The Jerks exist?

I don’t think it’s peaked, but it’s definitely no longer niche when you’ve got bands like Job For a Cowboy giving it a go. It’s going to become more commonplace throughout the 2020s as we get more and more material for budding musicians to reverse engineer, but that may also saturate the scene to the point where even I get sick of it.

The foundational bands like Gorguts and Demilich are celebrated because the sounds they achieved were the results of spontaneity and genuine experimentation. None of the earlier “dissodeath” bands sound particularly alike, but now there are these well-established languages with their own rules that are easily traceable to specific origins. This ain’t necessarily a bad thing, because I think the technical and theoretical demands still present a bulwark against lesser bands. Nevertheless, when some bands try to imitate the less challenging material, the prescriptiveness in their creative processes is fairly obvious.

As for the strong reactions to it on Sput? Not sure. I know it isn’t music that screams to be universally liked, but I think some (with emphasis on “some”) of it boils down to an attitude that pervades all music scenes, which is an aversion to anything new. Either way, a bunch of talented players sculpting coherent tunes from a hodge-podge of “wrong” notes – to the chagrin of stringy-haired puritans in Manowar shirts – is something I can get behind.

Rowhaus, c. 2020

Interesting. More importantly, what are your thoughts on the following Soulsborne miscellaneous?

• Ceaseless Discharge

Saddest lore

• Red Tearstone Ring

SL1 strats

• Earthen Keep

Elevators, because time is convoluted

• Earthen Keep Ruins

Pre-patch angels giving me PTSD

• Blades of Mercy

I need a PS5

• Loaded Umbrella

How to make the hardest FromSoft game the easiest

• Crossbreed Priscilla

Furry bait and a filthy liar

We should probably stop there, but I’ve never been afraid of alienating the 3% of Sputnik who don’t play Souls, so please align each of the following NPCs with a different member of Staff, with piercingly logical explications:

Eileen the Crow

Iluvatar, unconcerned by consequences, would take it upon themselves to (verbally) dispose of those who refused to die good users.

Solaire of Astora

Dewinged, inexplicably likeable Sput stablemate that half the site is semi-ironically gay for.

Patches the Thief

theacademy, survived among the staff ranks for literal aeons and nobody knows how; sows chaos wherever he goes and everyone is delighted when it happens.

Dark Sun Gwyndolin

Rowan5215, psychologically abused in life and death, attempts at making a huff are perceived as nothing more than a mild nuisance.

Gwynevere Princess of Sunlight

Rowan5215’s taste, an elaborately constructed illusion that people attack just for the fun of it.

Vengarl’s Head

greg84, I forgot he existed.

Quelaag’s Sister

Me, I require a substantial offering of 30 Ulcerate/Ulcerate-adjacent riffs to do anything, but what I do is of little value.

Quelana

Winesburgohio, an inconspicuous but greatly appreciated source of fire.

What question do you most wish I’d asked you by now?

No idea, maybe my favourite Sput trollview or something? In which case I’d have to give it to Mappy’s Beyond Cops, Beyond God write-up for having the highest concentration of quotable one-liners.

What is the best bird, and why?

The best bird is a birb, but the line between bird and birb is not well-defined. Birb lore is complicated. We know that all birbs are birds, but not all birds are necessarily birbs. Are birds and birbs divided along special lines? I’m probably not gonna get into that because it could be construed as problematic. Is birb a state of mind or the mode of being for a bird? How do borbs fit into the equation? Harder to answer.

I think the correct answer is that all birbs are the best birds, but the even more correct answer is that cockatiels are the bestest birds, because they radiate the most birb energy.

These are excerpts from your reviews. Please rewrite them as single, second-person sentences for a target audience of 12 year-olds in the 1970s:

• This penchant for variation and polyphony was – according to the band themselves – informed by a number of 20th century classical composers, such as Xenakis, Scelsi, Ligeti and Penderecki. It’s a relief that this influence extends far beyond the simple inclusion of tortured strings as a kind of dressing, imbuing the core structures of each song in a way that feels neither antiquated nor prescriptive.

“This band probably sounds like nonsense to you, but they actually take after a bunch of Eastern European dudes who made a living out of writing what you call nonsense.”

• Sure, nothing is wholly original, but it’s hard to become enamoured with Andersson’s latest work when it’s not just a retread of something that could never be described as such, but an inferior one at that. This isn’t to say the album is poorly performed or produced; the overall sound is dynamic and suitably dreamlike – clean and reverberant, draped in unprocessed tones and natural ambience alike

“What made Sweven special was that nothing really sounded like it up until that point, but now that’s ruined because this sounds like it and it’s also worse.”

• Heralded by many as the crown jewel of old school revivalism, with Nekropsalms considered a revelation and Black Death Horizon being something of a zenith for the movement, Obliteration’s place atop the death metal chaosphere is an enviable one. Well, sort of. It’s been half a decade since the quartet from Kolbotn “unleash[ed] the firebirds”, yet word of a new opus eluded us for what seemed like aeons. The radio silence was a reminder that the longevity of these monuments was still very much finite. 

“It’s a lot of pressure being the best at something, because people constantly expect the best from you; so when you need to take your time to live up to these expectations, they bitch and whinge about how they’re bored of what gave rise to those very expectations.”

How do you maintain a positive outlook on a spiteful internet?

I wasn’t aware my outlook came off as “positive”, if that’s what you’re implying. Either way, distancing yourself from major social media platforms is, without a shadow of doubt, one of the best things you can do for your mental health that you are also immediately capable of.

Do you have anything else you wish to share with our precious readerbase?

Everyone has different tastes in media, so it’s okay to like what you like.

Except Farrah Abraham.

Pon Pon Pon, thank you for your time!

Danke.